The living room.
My pulse rose so quickly the monitor beside me began beeping faster.
Dr. Reed looked over.
“There was a camera,” I said. “Above the west archway.”
Detective Bell did not smile. “Our officers are already securing the system.”
I closed my eyes.
For three days I had been trapped inside the memory of Flynn’s face, terrified that somehow money, influence, and Selina’s tears would turn what happened into an argument nobody could prove. But a camera had been watching the whole room.
Flynn had installed the witness himself.
The detective asked if Selina had ever accused me of violence before. I told him no. We disliked each other, but our conflict had mostly been made of silences, interruptions, and Flynn’s habit of changing plans whenever she called. Selina never needed to attack me openly. She only had to make herself fragile in his presence.
I told him about the conversation outside Flynn’s executive office a month earlier and the pregnancy test in my bag. I had not known I was carrying twins then. I had only known I was pregnant and afraid that telling my husband should not require waiting until his first love left the room.
Detective Bell paused his writing.
“Mrs. Vance, do you have somewhere safe to go when you’re discharged?”
The question landed strangely.
Our penthouse had been my home. My clothes were there. My books. My passport. The photographs from my wedding. Every object that proved I had built a life with Flynn was suddenly part of a crime scene.
“I’ll arrange something,” I said.
I had not worked in private equity for three years, but I still knew how to build a plan from incomplete information.
By evening, my former colleague Nora had reserved a furnished apartment under her firm’s corporate housing account. My sister in Boston offered to fly in. I told her not yet. I needed one person in my life to believe I could still make decisions for myself.
Nora did.
She did not ask why I had stayed with Flynn. She did not tell me she had always disliked Selina. She sat by my bed, held a straw while I drank water, and asked what I needed done first.
“Find my old lawyer,” I said.
She found him before midnight.
The next morning, Detective Bell returned with a copy of the living-room footage.
He did not play it without warning me.
“You don’t need to watch this,” he said.
“Yes, I do.”
I wanted to know whether memory had distorted anything. Whether fear had exaggerated Flynn’s expression. Whether Selina’s smile had really happened.
The recording was worse because it was ordinary.
There I was on the sofa with a cup of tea. Flynn was cutting an apple. Selina entered already cradling her arm. The camera had no perfect view of the scratch, but it captured her entire accusation. It captured me saying I had not left the house. It captured Flynn standing with the knife in his hand.
Then it captured him stabbing me.
Twice.
